Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It is the mystery of the unknown
That fascinates us; we are children still,
Wayward and wistful; with one hand we cling
To the familiar things we call our own,
And with the other, resolute of will,
Grope in the dark for what the day will bring.

“The Two Rivers,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Waverly awoke with the echo of laughter in her ears. It was a cruel sound. She pressed her hands against her eyes and wondered whose voice it could be, and why he was laughing at her so spitefully.

She sat up and opened her smarting eyes; the glare of sunshine they received merely worsened her headache, and a look at her surroundings worsened all of her questions. What was she doing here in the forest, lying on the dank ground? Where was she? What time was it? How much wine had she been drinking to put her in such a state? 

She lifted a hand to shade her eyes, but that wasn’t much use. The sun was reflecting off of a large pond just to her right. A pond? Was she at the summer house then? It was certainly hot enough to be summertime, and there was no other explanation for why she had been lying on her back beside a pond in the middle of the forest. …Yes, she was at the summer house. How silly of her to have forgotten a thing like that.

But what on earth had possessed her to lie down and nap in the wet, dirty grass? She was fond enough of the outdoors, but never in her fine clothes! There was mud all over her stockings and the skirt of her pretty blue dress. She had better run to the house and change right away before Mother saw the state of—oh….

Goodness, she truly was confused. She hadn’t forgotten about Mother that way since…. How long had it been? Two years? Three? It was perplexingly difficult to recall the specific dates of anything in that moment. 

She pressed her temples in an effort to keep confusion from descending into panic. A Lamb did not panic under any circumstances…even if those circumstances did feel like a nightmare she couldn’t quite dispel. The small clearing with its shining water and tranquil sound of frogs and katydids may as well have been a darkened room with the door nailed shut. Waverly wanted nothing more than to lie back down in the hopes that this truly was a bad dream, but she was standing in the middle of a forest, wearing a party dress with neither hat nor handbag, and she could not understand why! This awful headache was making her so dizzy and forgetful. Drinking too much wine ought to have only affected her memory of the previous evening, not the entire span of time which had brought her to their home in the country.

Waverly felt her heart race with anxiety when she attempted to recall the precise date, or even the year, and found that she could not do so. Heaven help her, she could scarcely remember the way back to the house as she looked around. It was terribly unnerving.

“Martha. Martha, are you there?” She waited only a few moments before calling her maid with a great deal more insistence. “Martha! Where are you? Come here at once. …Martha!”

The only thing to answer her summons were frogs from the pond, bleating and hooting after each of her cries like the echoes of a morose Greek chorus. She scowled at them angrily as they sat along the shore and floated in the water—and then her frown grew frightened instead. Good Lord, she had never seen such enormous frogs before! The size of the hulking amphibians was so improbable, she had to rub her eyes in disbelief before looking again. It changed nothing. The largest among them could have been alligators for all their bulk, and were those horns upon their heads?

Waverly backed away from the menacing horde, only to step on a smaller frog by accident. It squeaked and hopped off into the pond with a splash. There were answering squeaks and bellows and croaks in an undeniably angry uproar, and then more splashes as the entire platoon of oversized frogs emerged en masse. Frogs as big as flowerpots—big as dogs! Big as anything!

She tripped over her own feet and screamed as she fell backwards to the ground. The throng descended upon her. Their sticky tongues shot out of their mouths like arrows and lashed at her as though she were a giant fly. If she had been beaten all over by whips made out of snakes, she could not have been more horrified. With much wailing and flailing, Waverly scrambled to her feet and fled. Running from mammoth frogs with impossibly elastic tongues certainly sounded like the stuff of nightmare. Perhaps she was still asleep after all….

Alas, her skin stung all over from the assault of the evil amphibians, and the feeling was too corporeal to deny for a dream. She rubbed at the places on her face and arms as the spots turned into little red welts. The frogs couldn’t have been poisonous, could they? Who would ever have released such horrible creatures on her family’s property?

She walked. What else was there to be done? Nobody answered her calls, and Waverly was beginning to suspect that she had wandered quite far from the house, perhaps having hit her head at some point, whereupon she had developed some sort of amnesia…but that didn’t account for the unfamiliarity and seclusion of her surroundings. Even in the most remote part of their woods, it wouldn’t have taken her an hour to find some trace of civilization, and even in the dead of winter, it wouldn’t have looked like a completely foreign realm. It was summer through-and-through, as it always was when she came here, and yet she was walking through a forest which, she was beginning to realize, bore very little resemblance to her own.

Waverly wiped the tears away from her eyes, and she did her best to wipe off as much of the muck as she could manage. The first thing she would do once she reached the house was to soak in a hot bath with a large bowl of ice cream—and perhaps a glass of champagne as well. She wondered if the marks from the tongues of those disgusting frogs would ever wash out of her new dress and her white silk stockings, but silk was as common as air to her. She had no notion as to how stains and snags might be removed from the fabric, and it scarcely mattered to her at a time like this—and yet…. The stockings were of little importance, but there was something about this short blue dress which nagged at her fiercely. Had she intended it for something in particular? She had, certainly, but what? If only she could remember!

She called for her maid, her father, and her brother too. She couldn’t quite recall if Bradford had come with them for the season. She couldn’t seem to find the path to the house either. Had their woods always been this expansive? Could the landscape have changed so much?

“Martha!”

Oh, but wait…. Martha hadn’t been her maid since before Mother had died. Long before that, in fact. Martha had replaced Stephens when Waverly was only twelve years old. That was…how many years ago…? 

Horror of horrors, even her own age was not forthcoming. What in heaven’s name had happened to her? Was she concussed? Her household, the date, and even the forest she had known so well—they were all inexplicably alien to her. 

Waverly stood frozen with dread while birds sang in the trees and insects buzzed in the bushes. She covered her ears to block out the sound of the frogs croaking in the distance. Oh, something is dreadfully wrong. Why can’t I remember such simple matters? Precisely how much have I forgotten?

She could recall Mother’s death, but not how many years had passed since the epidemic. She remembered the Great War, and she knew that Bradford had been spared from the terrible fighting, but she could not say when the war had ended. She was not certain whether Bradford was here with her now at the summerhouse. She was no longer wholly certain that this was the summerhouse.

There was something sinister, just at the edge of her memory. Something which made her think of her Father and her new dress and…and her radio, for some strange reason. Yes, she remembered! She had returned home from Europe in anticipation of her twenty-fifth birthday with a renewed interest in music; and, with so much rain and ugly sleet as of late, she had been content to escape the cold indoors, enjoying her latest records and the new station broadcasting out of Springfield. There! She could place the season and the year.

Dismay deeper than anything she had experienced thus far followed on the heels of that realization, however. For it was autumn, not summer. Boston was having a very wet, very gloomy November, and even at their country home in the South, the weather ought to have reflected that. It would at least have been cold. What did this mean? 

With new eyes, it seemed, Waverly looked up and around at the trees and the water and the pale blue sky. It was autumn, her mother had been dead for three years, and there was no way that this was her family’s forest. Where in the world was she, then? And how had she come to be here?

Something truly was wrong, and it wasn’t simply a matter of her absent memory either. Something appalling had happened. She knew it was so. She could recall no particular reason for the feeling just yet, and yet it chased at her heels until confusion at last blossomed into panic and sent her into a headlong sprint. She forgot that she was an heiress and a lady of the Lambs. She was only an animal fleeing blindly from something which it couldn’t understand. 

A shadow and an evil laugh clawed at the edges of her mind. Waverly ran on and on as though this feverish trek would save her, until she was sure the woods were finally thinning up—and then she stopped short.

It wasn’t as if they appeared out of nowhere; Waverly simply failed to understand what she was seeing until it was too late, and then she was too close to do anything but freeze in sheer horror. She had mistaken them for a patch of black, wiry shrubs against the most expansive growth of Spanish moss she had ever beheld. They were, in fact, a swarm of spiders. Horrible, gargantuan spiders, bigger even than the frogs had been. They sat amongst equally enormous webs which had been strung over and between dozens of trees in a thick gray netting. The monstrous arachnids appeared to freeze in the same way she did, but that was little comfort when they were all clearly looking at her. Thousands of dark, beady eyes pinned her like a beetle to a board, and she could have sworn there was intelligent calculation in those hostile stares.

She imagined herself backing away from the silent creatures without any harm done. Instead, the spiders hissed at her—truly hissed, all at once and all together. It was the most hellish sound she had ever heard; Waverly felt her legs nearly give way at the sudden, utterly unholy chorus of demoniacal hissing.

Something did give way as she turned to escape the bone-chilling sight of black legs and black eyes and bulging gray webs. There was a snap from her left foot, and for a moment she believed her ankle to be broken. It was only the heel of her shoe, however. She had never broken a heel before; she didn’t know how to run in such a condition, but the spiders were still making that dreadful sound. Were they truly spiders? What sort of spider hissed like a snake? She wouldn’t dare linger long enough to find out!

She limped on for a few desperate yards, tore off both her shoes, and then bolted with the speed of a street car. She tripped over something and saw her bleeding foot but scarcely felt the pain. She didn’t check to see if the spiders had followed her for fear of finding that they had. She only clutched her shoes in her hands and ran for dear life.

Between fir trees which whipped her face with their needles, and low bushes which tore at her stockings with their twigs, she sprinted—and then stumbled—and then limped, certain that if she stopped, something terrible would catch up with her. Her only thought was safety and concealment at any cost, and she found it in the form of a perfect tree.

It didn’t seem to belong there in that forest, but she scarcely registered the thought. All that Waverly saw was shelter and separation from the perilous ground below, tentative as such a separation might be; that, too, was scarcely a thought in her mind.

The tree was a lovely, sprawling oak of the South, with sheltering branches thick as girders in a skyscraper. For just an instant, her mind was filled with memories of using such trees for pirate ships and palaces with her brother. Waverly hadn’t climbed any tree in years, but the limbs may as well have been a ladder to her. She held her shoes in one hand and scrambled up the giant as quickly as a cat, heedless of her bare feet and the precarious height. When she had climbed as far up as she could manage, she sat back against the trunk, looked down at her bloodied foot and scraped up legs, and began to sob with abandon. Why was this happening to her? Why, why couldn’t she remember where she was and how she had come to be here? 

In spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, Waverly managed to find a little sleep in her treetop refuge. The limb was broad enough to keep her from falling and breaking her neck, and she was apparently tired enough to doze on such a perilous perch. When she awoke, it felt as if no time had passed, but the sun was high overhead through the messy green canopy, the heat had grown more stifling, and the birds were a great deal quieter. She slid down the tree from branch to branch, hardly caring if she should fall—because there was one more change in the world which far outweighed anything else; it left Waverly sitting wide-eyed on the gnarled roots of the oak, her arms around her knees, heart hammering in her chest. 

Her memory of the previous evening had become dreadfully, inescapably clear.

What had she done? It wasn’t a dream. That man hadn’t been a dream. She was like Clara in The Nutcracker, only her mysterious Drosselmeyer had turned out to be the rat king instead. She could remember not only his laughter now, but his words as well.

Waverly shuddered and began crying once more. She was in an awful, unfamiliar forest with giant frogs and giant spiders, and she was going to miss her birthday party.

She didn’t weep for long, though; she was much too angry. That anger pulled Waverly back onto her bruised and bloodied feet. The stockings had torn away from both her ankles, and she was missing the nail from her littlest toe and some skin from the top of her foot. She did not care. She took her only good shoe and struck it viciously against the tree trunk until the heel finally broke off, scraping the knuckles of one hand in the process. She did not care about that, either. She didn’t know how to walk with broken heels, but she could learn. She didn’t know where she was, but she would find out. Perhaps an ordinary heiress would not survive such misfortunes, but she was, after all, a Lamb, and the Lambs did not give way beneath misfortune when it came.

Waverly put on her shoes with scarcely a wince for her wounds and marched off with every ounce of righteous fury she possessed. When she realized that her march tended in the direction of the spider creatures, she turned around and marched the other way, albeit with just as much dignity as before.

Maxwell. That was what he had called himself, the odious cad—the insidious cur—the treacherous, shadowy charlatan! She remembered his voice better than his face, but that wouldn’t stop her from finding that face and putting a sizable dent in it.

Goodness, she hadn’t entertained such violent thoughts since she and Bradford had been quite young. She certainly hadn’t fought with anyone apart from her brother, and scarcely ever had their battles come to actual blows—no more than pelting each other with clods of dirt and the occasional vegetable. She had never struck a person before. Such a thing would no longer be true, however, once she found that lying, loathsome…!

Waverly screamed a little. A few birds flew out of the bush in front of her. She plunged through the shrubbery as though it were a fist through that man Maxwell’s face, not a care for the state of her lovely blue dress. She was going to hunt down the villain, hit him very hard, and then have him arrested. And then have her brother hit him too! Of course, Bradford might be just as upset with her for ever having done anything as foolish as making a deal with a strange man. A man whose voice had appeared over her radio, whose face was more shadow and shape than flesh and blood…. Oh dear.

That consideration stopped her plans, although it didn’t stop her feet. What was she going to tell them? That she had accepted a mysterious offer from a man on her radio and then found herself in a forest of monsters? Perhaps she could preserve her father and brother’s faith in her sanity if she manufactured a more believable tale. She decided quickly that a clandestine stroll in the night had ended with her kidnapping, perhaps for some dreadful occultic ritual from which she had escaped, only to find herself lost in the middle of the wilderness. …But how had she come to the middle of the wilderness in the first place? That point was still quite absent in her memory, although she had a distinct impression of shadowy hands clutching at her—hands truly made out of shadow, like something from a storybook—and of a gaunt face laughing at her pitilessly. Good Lord, she sounded fit for a sanitarium.

Waverly vacillated between fighting back panic, dwelling on childhood memories, and refining the false story and its details as she continued to pick her way through the woods, over roots and under bows and around bushes and briars. She would walk on until either night fell or she reached some semblance of civilization, whatsoever it might be.

“Pay attention,” Bradford demanded. “You might just need to know this one day.”

“Why on earth might I need to know a thing as inconsequential as which stone is better or worse for beautifying a campfire?” She turned away as though disinterested. She did want to know, but she hated the way he sometimes spoke to her as if he were a grown man and she a mere child. He enjoyed it, she was certain. And, anyway, she wanted to learn how to start a fire, not how to decorate one.

“Very well,” he answered with a similar tone of indifference. “I suppose you take great pleasure in having your head blown to pieces by exploding stones.”

She turned back around with a gasping, “What?”

“No, no,” Bradford insisted. “It is clearly much too dull a subject to interest a child of your age.” He let the stone fall from his hand.

Waverly felt her color rising in embarrassment and exasperation; all interest in the topic was lost beneath her anger. “Don’t you dare call me a child! Why, you aren’t even ten years old—and that is years and years away from ever being a man.”

“Hmph! I am more of a man now than you will ever be of a lady. A real lady of the Lambs would know which kind of stone will explode next to a fire, and you aren’t ever going to know that now, so there.”

“If you don’t tell me which kind explodes, I’ll tell Mother, and she will make you go inside, and then I’ll ask Father which kind of stone is which. So there!”

“No, she won’t, and Father might not know which is which, so double-there.”

“He would too know, and anyway, if you don’t tell me, then I…I’ll—I’ll tell Father about the floor. I really will!”

Bradford rose to his full height and gave her the darkest scowl she had ever seen. 

"Oh dear," Waverly whispered.

Her tramp had come abruptly to an end. There appeared to be more pressing problems at hand than what she would say to Father and Bradford about her abduction. 

"This is certainly not the summer house…."

The forest had cleared at last, but only to reveal the most enormous cliff she had ever seen in person or in pictures. Waverly could scarcely force herself to approach the edge. Even the cliffs in Maine weren’t so high. It felt comparable to the view from atop the Woolworth Building, a sheer drop all the way down to an angry sea, and not a sign of ships or peaceful shoreline to be seen. There was no smoke or distant islands on the horizon. Nothing could be heard but the scream of gulls and the distant roar of waves far too far below.

Waverly backed away until she was once again within the safety of the trees. She swallowed against the nauseous feeling which rushed from her stomach to her chest. It wasn’t the impossible height of the precipice which had sickened her so, but rather what it signified. Her ignorance was decently average when it came to geography. She knew that this couldn’t be Boston—perhaps not even New England. She was beginning to wonder if she was on the East Coast at all…or anywhere in the United States, for that matter. Could this be Africa? It might explain the spiders, but wasn’t that more of a jungle than a woodland forest? Perhaps some uncharted part of Europe or Russia, then? But if that was so, she had no way to account for the journey there—and seemingly all in one night, too!

With an aching head and a chest tight with panic, Waverly turned her back on the daunting precipice and picked a new direction in which to march, doing her best not to think as she went along. She was bound to find a street sign or a helpful policeman at some point. And then perhaps she would see her mistake, that she was still somewhere close to home and simply knew less about coastal geography than she had previously believed. She said a prayer, put Africa—or Europe, or Russia—out of her mind, and walked on through the forest.

She was able to carry her hope of a swift return home all the way until evening, when her expectations were dashed to smithereens. It was the moon. She hadn’t known what to make of it when it first appeared through the trees, some time before dusk had begun to fall. She couldn’t have said how long a time she stood there watching it like a grotesque zeppelin rising higher and higher, crushing her hope with every inch it emerged. Just like the cliff, it was impossibly enormous and, what’s more, rather blue-ish in color; even the craters were all wrong, too large, too far apart and few between. Their shapes formed no silhouette of a woman holding her child or the vague impression of an old man with a smile. This moon was as much a stranger to her as every other creature she had met. Giant spiders, demonic frogs…and now a moon which simply could not have been her own.

She wasn’t in Boston anymore. She wasn’t anywhere anymore, or at least not anywhere she knew. Certainly not Africa, or Europe, or Russia, because there would still be a proper night sky with familiar constellations and the same old moon. …But no, that was impossible. She must have been mistaken—dazed from her terrible hunger and thirst and the frightening things which had happened to her.

Night fell, and Waverly came to rest on a large rock in a thinner section of forest, hopefully devoid of spiders and evil amphibians. The boulder was moderately flat on top, bathed in sheltering moonlight, and, while terribly uncomfortable, it was well-warmed from a day of sun. She knew that there wouldn’t be a better bed for her tonight. Perhaps she ought to have searched longer for another oak tree to sleep in, but the thought of finding one and falling out of it while unconscious was almost as unpleasant as the idea of coming across another swarm of spiders. She said another prayer and, with one more look at her sad surroundings, lay down. 

The rock was rough against her bare, scratched-up legs; she had stripped off her stockings once they had begun to resemble Swiss cheese more than respectable garments. Now she was running around…somewhere, or perhaps nowhere…with bare legs, broken shoes, and not a morsel of food in her stomach. She felt more foolish than ever for having attempted a hunger strike yesterday evening, and she would have gladly traded gold for the supper she had so tragically chosen to forgo. It would no doubt have failed in convincing her father to come to her party, anyway.

"Father must be terribly worried by now," she murmured, and then— "hmph, should he even notice I’m gone, that is." 

In spite of the forgiving temperature of the night, Waverly found herself dearly wishing that she had been given the chance to put on something more substantial than a mere party dress. Every time her mind wandered, she began pulling at the hem as though she could coax it down further over her legs. She felt so dreadfully exposed without any stockings. Father hated this dress—it barely reached her calf—and had forbidden her from wearing it in his presence ever again. It was the most prominent reaction she had drawn out of him in a long time. Last night, she had gone to him both to plead with and to provoke him: to plead that he attend her party even though she had half-known already what he would say, and, in anticipation of that answer, to provoke him with the shocking shortness of the gown she would wear. Now she was trapped in its short sleeves and scandalous hemline until she could find her way back home. She might have been better off in her nightgown, for all the cover it provided.

When something cool brushed against her chest, she gasped and slapped a hand over it in fright, only to realize—her necklace. It was a miracle that it hadn’t caught on a branch and broken during her frantic gallop through the forest. She closed her hand around the small locket, wept a little more, and, against all odds, slept.

Her first thought upon waking in the golden morning light was not of birdsong and the sweet, warm smell of fir and flowers and damp grass, but of a broken back; her second thought was of a sunbaked desert. Her stomach took precedence over every other consideration, however. An aching back, a desiccated throat, and not so much as half a scone for breakfast! 

"Well then," she murmured, her voice sounding out of place against the bird-gilded silence, "I suppose that I…ought to find something to eat…if I possibly can." And, remembering that a Lamb never faced adversity with anything less than utmost dignity, she put her chin in the air and marched, pretending that she did not feel the pain of her crooked back and battered feet.

One of the prime delights in her summers with Bradford had been feasting on the wild fruits of field and forest. Her brother wasn’t here to help her find berries and fruits and edible plants, and it didn’t look as though she would be fishing for her dinner, sadly…. So it was with great surprise that, not late into the morning, she did indeed find something to eat.

Well, she found carrots. There was a good deal of water contained in carrots, wasn’t there? She couldn’t quite remember, as she had only ever fed raw ones to her rabbits; but her heart leapt at the potential of something refreshing for her dry throat, even if it was only the possibility of uncooked, dirty vegetables. The bright green sprigs in their haphazard little rows seemed to turn the gloomy woods into a wonderland.

Waverly had been so happy to recognize something edible, she scarcely even wondered why the vegetables were arranged in a semblance of the sort of rows a farmer might make, nor did she take more than a little notice of the shabby wooden hut squatting nearby. A hovel was hardly anything remarkable, especially to the eyes of an heiress, and she had seen many such structures during her summers down South. …And then it occurred to her that, in a place like this, any sort of house was an extraordinary thing, and her heart leapt with hope beyond mere breakfast. She could hardly expect anything as helpful as a telephone, but even so, perhaps her salvation had come at last! 

The hut was small, and it had only one window—a genuine window with actual glass, albeit cracked and dirtied—and in the window was a pale, misshapen face. Large black eyes watched her over a deformed nose which was pressed against the pane.

Monster!

Her heart froze into a tight knot, and her breath caught painfully in her chest; her entire body seemed to throb with fear.

The monstrous face remained fixed to the window.

So much for her salvation! Run? Remain still? She couldn’t choose one over the other. Her torso twisted around as if to flee, while her feet remained frozen to the ground.

And still the creature merely blinked at her from its filthy glass window.

Waverly’s stomach chimed in with an almost comical burst of need despite the icy fear churning there, and a decision stirred in her mind, hasty and undeniably foolish. She was certain now that the best thing to do was to flee—there would be at least a few seconds’ delay as the monster inside the hut ran to its door to pursue her…but…but she felt absolutely ravenous! And here was a good deal of food right in front of her….

She hadn’t eaten since her lunch the day before, and she had never managed to keep on a hunger strike lasting any longer than two meals. A restless night and a day on the run transformed hunger into foolhardy courage the likes of which she had never known. Waverly dared to hold the creature’s eyes as she very slowly stooped down and began to uproot carrots, pulling them up with one hand and bunching them in the other. She didn’t look away from the piercing gaze until it suddenly disappeared. The shabby door of the house flew open, and out ran a screaming, two-legged pig. Four legs, rather—two of them carrying the owner very swiftly towards Waverly while the remaining pair flailed angrily in the air.

It squealed in a rough voice and charged at her, arms still flailing.

Waverly didn’t even scream. She dropped the carrots and ran from the bipedal abomination as swift as any coward. The shrieks of the pig creature were drowned out by her heartbeat in her ears and the crash of branches as she plunged into the underbrush. Perhaps taking the more difficult path would dissuade the pig from following her, but in truth her only consideration was blind escape. Hunger was forgotten for a time as she fled through the forest, no dignity, no breakfast.

She kept on until her knees gave out beneath her, and she didn’t attempt to rise again. One arm over her eyes, one hand clutching her locket, she sobbed her heart out on the filthy forest floor like an infant. Lying on top of tree roots and crying over carrots was not survival. Bradford would be disappointed with her, but Bradford hadn’t almost died at the hands of a breakfast food with feet. Lord, what she wouldn’t have given for a plate of hot bacon. She would never go on another hunger strike for as long as she lived!

Worse now than the hunger, however, was the thirst. Had she been offered a glass of the sweetest, most florid wine, she would have traded it for just a mouthful of water, never mind whether it came from a dirty faucet or a babbling brook. During their summer encampment, Bradford had often boiled water from the river; now she would happily have taken it brown with mud. 

As she had done the day before, Waverly walked on, more miserable than she would have thought possible. Her ears strained for the sound of water, and her eyes went to and fro as she trudged, seeking anything which resembled any sort of food.

Without further disaster, just as the sky was turning dusky, she reached a break in the seemingly endless forest. The woods diminished and then gave way quite suddenly to a border of younger trees and thinner shrubbery, and beyond that lay a wide grassy plain. She felt no relief at this abrupt change in scenery. Far across the field in front of her, the sun was setting into yet more forest; she looked left and right down the long corridor of open land and saw nothing more than the same barren field and forest beyond. It was like standing at the edge of an abandoned giant’s boulevard, and there was, of course, no suggestion of civilization in sight. 

At the shrubby border of that forest, however, Waverly found something better to her in that moment than an overgrown railway or the remains of a road. Food! Here and there along the underbrush which lined the woods were berry bushes. She didn’t know what kind of berries they were or if they were poisonous. She didn’t care, either. She plucked the small red godsends with tearful fervor as though they were the fruit of life. How much like a fairytale ragamuffin she must have looked, gobbling down handfuls of wild berries in her dirty dress. She felt little shame, though—only hunger and thirst.

She moved north along the forest’s edge, glad for the open space to her left; what a nice change from being cramped in amongst the trees all day long. Bush after bush she picked over as the sun set on the other side of the field, sending the shadows of the trees there creeping nearer and nearer to her edge of the forest. But the moon had been rising in the east, and its strange, bright light flooded the plain while the light of the stars overhead made the berries appear nearly luminous. She thought of nothing but the sweet taste of food and the comforting glow of light. Even the dark shadows of the forest didn’t bother her.

But she still wasn’t full by the time the moon was much higher in the sky. It wasn’t as full as it had been the previous evening, although it was still a veritable arc lamp overhead, brighter than any full moon she had ever seen. She searched diligently for any remaining morsels in the long hedge, doing her best to stave off thoughts of poisoning and thirst and strange moons and, most of all, of pig monsters approaching without her notice under the cover of the blustery night. It was difficult to resist peering into the deep dark woods to her right or peeking over her shoulder at the wide, forbidding plain behind. 

There was something else too which set her on edge. At some point, underneath the noise of the rushing wind, a sound had begun to reverberate in the distance. Waverly had so focused her attention on finding the last of the berries as quickly as she could, that she could not have said when it started, let alone its precise direction and cause. It was a rhythmic, but by no means consistent, on-and-off-again noise…a dull thudding which made her wonder where she had heard it before.

She chewed her last handful of berries, deciding that they were not poisonous—surely they would have affected her by now, if they were—and that the noise was not near enough for her to worry. But then she decided that it reminded her of a shutter banging against a window, and thinking of windows and houses had her picturing the monster pig in its hut, setting out at this very moment to harvest the berries she had just eaten. She almost turned tail then and there. She did turn…but if there was a house, there might be more carrots, and perhaps the monstrous pig would not be setting out in search of berries now that it was night. Perhaps it would not see her in the darkness beneath the trees. 

She kept to the line of the forest as much as she could but still felt quite exposed as she approached the supposed house. A long finger of trees extended from the woods a ways in front of her, thinner than the rest of the forest, intersecting her path. That was certainly where the source of the knocking lay. The house must have been on the other side of that offshoot of trees. She would at least have a chance of escaping any potential attackers by running back into the dark woods, loath as she was to do so. It was better than attempting a retreat through the open field on her left; it was certainly as wide across as any city park, and it extended out of sight to the north and south. Even now she could not see the end of it. 

Well, she had no notion as to how far and how quickly the pig monsters could run, and while she had once been as adept at sprinting as her brother ever was, she would hardly dare to stake her life on such a thing now. Better to duck into the forest and evade any pursuing pigs in its shadows, if she must. She need not go very deep to escape the likes of such a dimwitted-looking creature, surely. Moreover, the one she had seen may very well be the only one there was, in which case all her anxiety was for nothing. She would brave anything, though, whether it be pig monsters or getting lost in the woods, if she could only find a single carrot to eat—and she might have dared even more for a mere mouthful of water!

Having such a well-formed plan scarcely helped her to feel any happier as she neared the perpendicular offshoot of forest and the source of the tok, tok, tok. There was something about the sound which bothered her; the way it sometimes bordered on perfect regularity made her wonder if the source could really be quite as inanimate as a window shutter. It was too slow and irregular to be machinery. Spiders could not make a sound like that, could they? Perhaps she was advancing toward something worse than anything else she had met….

Hunger steeled her resolve, however, and she moved carefully but steadily forward. The sound had a distinctly wooden quality to it, strengthening her idea that it indeed belonged to another pig monster’s hut. Surely a human could see better in the dark than a pig. She would no doubt spot the house and any vegetables long before anything saw her in return. 

Waverly came to the spit of forest which crossed her path, keeping a sharp eye out for any figures or houses. There was movement all around her from the wind, and it made her anxious. Moonlight fell between the younger trees and offered her only meager cover there. She tried to walk in their bushy shadows, timing her steps to the knocking—the rhythm was now far too measured and invariable to be a mere shutter, but it was too late to turn back now. She had gone a whole day without food, and, Lamb or not, no sane person lying at death’s door would have behaved any differently, no matter what Bradford would have said about it.

The knocking stopped. Waverly stood still. The wind was so boisterous, her footsteps wouldn’t possibly be detected, and she was so hungry and thirsty, she scarcely even cared if they were. After a moment longer, she hurried forward.

She wasn’t quick enough to stop herself from crying out when she tripped. Waverly pressed one hand over her mouth and the other over her bleeding shin. She had fallen forward against something. It was a stump, she now saw, one of many. She also saw at that moment something like a person coming towards her through the thin trees.

Moonlight illuminated the figure quite clearly. It was a man, and he was holding an axe. He had long legs, ragged clothes, and a dark, barbaric beard. That was all she had time to appraise before she was on her feet and running.

Suddenly the shadows of the dark woods with their possibility of pig monsters and giant spiders felt far less threatening. Who would have ever believed that a human being instill more fear than actual monsters? But Waverly had never seen such an unruly looking character in all of her life, and she had immediately known that he would kill her with that axe if she did not flee. A rather gruesome piece in one of her magazines had detailed the cannibalistic tendencies of men with horrible whiskers who lived all alone in the countryside. When he shouted at her to wait, it only helped her to run faster—into the forest, as far as she could go. She would run forever if it meant getting away from the grizzled villain and his gleaming axe. 

She heard him call, "Come back!" Wild horses could not have matched her speed at the sound of that frightening voice . What a twisted kind of irony! She ought to have rejoiced at meeting another human being in the middle of this nightmare, if only because it would prove that she wasn’t completely alone. Waverly had been wishing for just such a thing. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might meet a murderer of all people—a man who would leap out of the woods with a beard like a pirate and an axe for chopping her to bits. Would her misfortunes never end?

If she never needed to run again a day in her life, she would be grateful. She ran, tripped and fell, picked herself back up, and ran again. The second time she fell, she stopped. She ought to have been far enough from the wildman now to warrant a bit of rest, but there was none to be found. She lay where she had fallen, motionless not in exhaustion, but in the awful certainty that there was something in the woods with her. It was an obvious sort of fact, of course—even a normal forest without giant spiders and upright pigs would have been teeming with life—but this…. 

Waverly scrambled to her feet and pressed on in spite of the sudden soul-deep chill. Had she been a dog, the fur over her shoulders would have been standing on end. She walked and then waited, walked and then waited, her eyes digging into the darkness but seeing nothing. There was, however, most definitely something. Was it another pig monster, or perhaps one of the spiders? Something lurked just on the edge of her hearing, in the margins of her sight. Waverly didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. She was being followed.

A mystery in the dark, or a murderer out in the open? Starvation, or death by pig monsters or poison berries? Why was she suddenly having to make such ludicrously dire decisions? How could this happen to her—to an heiress—to a Lamb? It simply wasn’t fair!

She crouched on the ground in a meager patch of moonlight and began weeping once again. Bradford would have been ashamed. He would have had a fire going and their supper roasting over the flames. She would have given anything for a nice fire and the sight of her brother’s face, whether he laughed or scolded. What would he have done in this sort of situation?

“Persevered, of course,” she answered herself, “as any Lamb would do.”

Waverly dried her face, rose to her feet, and resumed her steady march to…anywhere. Steady too was the feeling of being followed by something dark, as if the shadows themselves were trailing at her heels. It was a relief every time a breath of moonlight broke through the canopy—like sunlight bursting through the clouds on a cold day. It seemed to clear her head a bit more each time she stood in the light, and, very soon, hope pushed up through despair.

Tomorrow she would build a fire and put all those unburdened summer days to good use. Her brother had shown her how; she simply had to remember. For now, though, she was going to sit against this dead tree, wrapped in the large swath of moonlight it let fall around her, and pray for the morning to come quickly.

It did, but not quickly, and Waverly was wide awake to see it. She had been too uncomfortable to sleep—and, eventually, too alarmed. The feeling of being watched had never abated, not once. All night long, something had been moving out in the darkness, and the later the hour grew, the bolder it had become. Even when morning came in earnest with vague light through the trees, there was little difference.

This was her third day of walking and her second morning without breakfast. The idea of being pursued by something ghostly helped to push such things out of her mind, however. She would look back every so often, blink hard, squint her eyes, and shake her head at the phantom sounds she simply must have been imagining. Hallucination was a symptom of hunger, wasn’t it? Or perhaps it was a sign of the dreadful thirst which was steadily beginning to dominate every inch of her thoughts.

Waverly was surprised when the forest began to thin once again. The grass was thicker and the trees grew farther apart. There were stumps here too…and she would have left the place simply for fear of it being somewhere the Axe Man would haunt…if it weren’t for the fact that there were carrots everywhere! Their feathery leaves stood tall, proudly volunteering to be her meal. And—goodness, not just carrots either; there were violets and dandelions and what were certainly wild onions, all of which seemed to glow in the buttery sunshine. They grew in clumps beside trees where the ground was moist and the grass was thickest. There was even a brook nearby, burbling cheerfully down in its rocky bed.

She stood still for a minute and gazed in wonder at the cornucopia of growing things. She wanted to shout, to sing. The grove was so beautiful after so much darkness, and there was so much to eat, she thought that she might cry again. But she was done with weeping. It was time to act more like her brother, a true Lamb, and less like the helpless girl she had sadly been proving herself thus far.

The summer after she and Bradford stopped fighting and became friends, her parents allowed him to take her along not for a day, but for the entire duration of his "excursion." That was what Mother always called it. Father called it cabin fever or mere foolishness. Bradford was in the Scouts, and for a few weeks every summer, he went camping with his troop. He would join his family at the summer house after that and, instead of living in "a civilized manner befitting a young gentleman and a Lamb," as Father said, Bradford would go off into their forest and live on his own—for as long as Father would allow it, at least. That was no more than a month at most, and some years it was no more than a few weeks. The day inevitably came when Father tracked him down—usually somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchens—and said to him, "Bradford Lamb, you will sleep indoors like a gentleman’s son, or you will be sleeping at Andover in the autumn,” and that was the end of the excursion. 

Mother never minded Bradford’s keeping camp on his own. She called him “a natural outdoorsman” and often visited him with Waverly in tow. Bradford would show them his camp and his supply of kindling and whatever food he had foraged thus far. Father never joined them. He had no taste for the wilderness, even one as relatively tame as their own forest, and he habitually protested Bradford’s yearly adventure…until Waverly at last intervened. She had a talent for getting her way with Father even before Mother had died, and the summer when she was ten and Bradford was thirteen, she told their parents that she couldn’t bear the thought of her brother ever being sent away to school and that he ought to be left to his woodland independence for as long as he liked. That was that! And in gratitude for saving him from their father’s annual threat of boarding school, Bradford took her with him on each of his excursions for the next three summers afterwards, until he again grew too old to be friends with her anymore.

She missed those summers dearly. She missed having a mother and a true friend and the sound of her father’s laughter from the sitting room and at the table. All this solitude had reopened the old wound, it would seem. Waverly’s gold locket hung cool against her chest, and she clutched it with a sniffle.

No more crying, though. She shook the memories from her head, looked around with her hands on her hips, and went to work.

“If the Lambs built Massachusetts,” she said, “then I can certainly manage a little thing like a campfire.”

Building fires, gathering food, it had always been a part of the excursions. Bradford hadn’t ever used matches to start a fire—he didn’t even need to use flint—and he had been proud to teach his sister the same art. It wasn’t until after his return from university that he began to say that she ought to occupy herself with more ladylike pastimes. However, she had learned quite enough from him during their summers to sustain her now…she hoped.

That evening, she was no longer hungry or thirsty—well, she was still hungry, though she had been safely removed from the brink of starvation, at least—but she was frightened, because she could not start a fire.

She had found a sharp stone near the brook, the shape of a hand comb and simply perfect for preparing a campfire. She had found a serviceable branch, successfully split it as best she could with the wonderful stone, and had little trouble carving a notch in the middle where the embers would go. That was the point at which her progress ceased. Waverly spun a fine, sturdy stick in the mouth of the notch. She had twigs and bracken at hand, and a small pile of tinder waiting to receive the spark when it formed. She spun and spun until her hands were red, but there was no fire that night. At least the air was warm, and she was blessedly spared any mosquitoes or biting flies, in spite of the stream so close at hand. But the exertion of attempting to start her fire had taken its toll—her stomach was empty again. 

The moon, at least, was full. Waverly wished that she were the moon….

The next morning, she woke up feeling hot and uncomfortable and hungrier than ever before. Foraging in her not-so-enchanted wood did little to change the state of her appetite. She ate everything she could find, from carrots to dandelions. Surely she had never appreciated so keenly such mean and meager fare, yet she was still famished!

She was also filthy. The previous evening, she had washed only her face and arms in the little brook, too tired to attempt a full bath. She regretted it now. There was another matter too which left her feeling soiled, and that was the necessity of relieving herself in the most primitive manner possible. Why had she ever reveled in that taboo liberty as a child? What foolishness! Yesterday’s nostalgia was quickly fading into shame. Wearing dirty clothes, bathing in water which was inhabited by any manner of slimy creatures, and neglecting a kitchen full of delicacies not a mile away, day in and day out…. It was no wonder Bradford had banned such summertime escapades once he reached a more sensible age. 

When she was young, stripping away her clothes and bathing in the river which flowed through their woods had seemed an unparalleled blessing—one of life’s most inimitable expressions of independence. She had imagined herself as Robinson Crusoe or Huckleberry Finn; now she felt like a common tramp, hungry and bedraggled. She sat in the deepest part of the stream, but the water only reached up to her chest. Even while floating with one’s eyes closed, it was difficult to forget that one was bathing without any soap when the muddy bottom of your would-be bathtub was mere feet beneath you. At least she could pretend that she was clean and refreshed as she sat in the lush grass on the shore afterwards, warmed by the sunshine. She had rinsed her dress and under things as best she could, and they were drying beside her. It would have been a wonderful place for a nap, had she been truly clean and wearing something made of soft, loose linen. As it was, she felt too indecent to doze…not to mention too hungry.

Looking up and to her right at the dappled green glory of a tree overhanging the brook, she saw something which in any other context would have been utterly ordinary. Now it brought her to her feet in bemused exultation. 

“Oh—but it can’t possibly be autumn,” she said to herself, “although it ought to be. But they look perfectly ripe. Can they really be chestnuts? Perhaps these are some sort of poisonous foreign lookalike. Oh, I don’t care, if only they taste like chestnuts!”

She trotted forward, all caution momentarily forgotten, along with her clothes. The world looked cheerful once again at the sight of those joyful, shining brown treasures clustered all over the tree. She nearly stepped on one which had fallen free of the spiny husk. Waverly laughed and bent over to pick it up. Her smile vanished. 

“Or perhaps they are horse chestnuts,” she murmured. “That would certainly be in keeping with all the other misfortunes thus far.”

But no, she could see the leaves and shells quite clearly on the branches above her, and when she looked at her feet, she spotted more than enough evidence that her misfortunes had ended at last—at least as far as her stomach was concerned. 

Even more so—she looked beyond that beautiful tree and saw another one there beside it, just as tall and laden with nuts! The ground beneath them held a trove of windfalls with many more partially concealed within the grass. She smiled at the one on which she had nearly stepped, tossed it into her mouth, and immediately spit it back out into her hand. 

She stared in horror at the half-chewed thing. Was it spoiled? The meat looked white and the shell looked clean, but the bite had left bits of papery stuff all in her mouth, and the taste was so bitter! Oh—one didn’t eat chestnuts raw, of course. If only she could have started a fire. And even if she had, she knew no way to roast them. They were not fish; she could not stab them with a stick and hold them over a fire. Were they the sort of food which acted like a poison when eaten raw? Good Lord, she was so dreadfully hungry!

Waverly put the partially mashed nut back into her mouth, trying her best to taste it as little as possible. It was a difficult thing to swallow. She loathed bitter food. Even so, better bitter food than none at all. With considerably less enthusiasm, she put on her clothes and began to hunt for windfalls in the thick, silky green grass. There was quite a pile when she had found them all. She sat down and set about peeling shells with the aid of her sharp stone. It hurt her fingers terribly, but her souring mood only helped her to push past the pain—and she would make a fire tonight, so they all needed to be shelled, even if her hands were poked to pieces in the process.

The air was warm and sweet. Insects hummed around her, birds warbled nearby, and the brook trickled gently at her side. The grass was so long and tangled as she ran her fingers through it in search of chestnuts; it reminded her of how Mother would comb through her hair in the evenings after her bath…the gentle hum of her voice as she sang…the comforting warmth of the fire…the softness of the nightgown and the towel around her shoulders….

She pricked her palm against one of the spiny shells and startled from her daydream. She needed to hurry and finish this so that she could begin…but the grass was like a feather bed compared to the hard ground on which she had been sleeping, and the sun was like an invisible blanket, and she was so terribly drowsy. Reclining for just a moment wouldn’t do any harm. She laid herself down, shut her eyes, and dreamed briefly of home as it was before.

When something brushed against her throat, Waverly jolted upright with a gasp. A horde of bright red squirrels rushed away from her. She looked after them in surprise and then in anger when she noticed how much smaller her pile of shelled chestnuts had grown. It hadn’t been very large to begin with, but now it was hardly a pile at all! There weren’t many left in the grass either—only half-chewed remains and empty, prickly husks. Those worthless, heartless, cowardly vandals! With tears in her eyes and hatred for every squirrel who had ever lived, she gathered the sad remains of her meal, quite determined to come back with a way to knock down the rest of the nuts before the bright red beasts could manage it. 

Now, as to preparing her meal…. She had no pots or pans to boil or roast them. She supposed that placing them on a flat stone set near the fire might accomplish the same, but the method mattered little when she still had no fire. In her home, chestnuts always came out of the kitchen already seasoned and toasted, and with a glass of hot wassail, too, and slices of apples and clementines and…. Her stomach grumbled, and she grumbled along with it. One way or another, she would roast these chestnuts, even if she had to hold them over the flames with her own two hands. Tonight she would simply have to make a fire!

But she didn’t.

Waverly spun the stick between her hands until blisters formed on her palms. She had never seen blisters on her own hands before. She shrieked when she saw them, and she shrieked when they opened as she turned the stick without pause. A thin, peevish bit of smoke appeared several times, but always sporadically and without any true embers. It wasn’t until her hands bled that she finally stopped. Despite a determination not to cry anymore, she lay on the ground weeping as the night came on. She pulled her necklace out of her collar and held it in her hand. She hadn’t opened it to look at the picture inside for the last three years. Instead, she fell asleep staring at the moonlight shining on the locket; the diamond in the center gleamed like a star.

The moon was not quite full anymore.

When the next day dawned, she was as sore as an old woman, famished to the point of fatigue, and, to her surprise, blindingly angry. She jumped up and ran over to the would-be fire, kicking at the pile of kindling and snatching up the wretched spinning stick. Instead of snapping it in half, she sat down and began to turn it harder than ever before. Her hands bled. Her blisters made the stick feel like a red-hot iron. Tears coursed down her cheeks. But she was too angry to give up now.

The taste of the chestnut was still in her mouth, but she didn’t care; nor did she care about the sweet singing of the birds in the trees and sun shining on her back. She stopped spinning that wretched stick only when she was very thirsty or needed to relieve herself—and she didn’t care about that anymore, either. If she didn’t have a roaring blaze by the time evening fell, why, she would turn this stick into a spear and stab it through her own heart! What a dreadful notion! But she relished the rebellion of having such ghastly thoughts. She bit her cheeks to distract from the pain in her hands and spun, spun, spun. 

All to no avail.

How could a little thing like a fire be so impossible? How had Bradford managed to make it appear so effortless? How had she failed so desperately in learning from him?

Half that day was spent in frustration and failure with two snapped spinning sticks, two bleeding hands, and sweat in two tired eyes. Her body had transformed into a union of screaming muscles and stinging skin. The frustration was worse than anything else, though. Just when she seemed to be making headway with the most prominent plume of smoke so far, she lost it to the pain of newly opened blisters. When she managed at last to produce an ember, she lost that too. Three or more times that urgent scene was repeated. She dropped the ember, blew it out, successfully moved it into the tinder and then blew it out…failure after failure. The birds grew louder and then softer as the sky turned a vivid purple, but she scarcely noticed the changes and certainly felt no appreciation for them.

All too soon, the night began to encroach in earnest. Waverly had by that time exhausted her anger and was now going at it with sheer mechanical apathy. Her arms felt like leaden ingots. Her hands felt as though they had been pulverized. Her back and shoulders were surely sorer than Atlas beneath the globe. 

I have only just turned twenty-five, she thought mournfully, and already I am old. 

Every joint in her body seemed to crackle when she looked around herself for the first time in hours; she did so only because it was growing so dark. A night wind was stirring, fresh and strong. The birds ceased to sing some time ago. The sky was the color of dark wine, and the stars were out. They were much brighter tonight.

She tried to rise from the ground; her legs hurt too badly, and she fell back down. As she rolled onto her back and gazed at the sky, a sense of dread swept through her. Good Lord, she hadn’t imagined it—the stars were much too bright, no moonlight to make them faint. Why? Was it hiding behind some clouds, or had it not even risen yet? The stars might be her only light….

They were beautiful, strange, and far too big, just like the moon.  It would have been a breathtaking sight, if not for the black dread churning in Waverly’s stomach. The stars were brighter than any she had ever seen—bright as a sky bathed in the light of a full moon. There was certainly enough light to see, but that made no difference to the fear which wrapped her in its cold, creeping arms until she could hear nothing but her heart hammering away. The stars seemed to pulse in time with the blood in her ears. She stared up at them until they blurred out of focus and the sound of her heartbeat faded a little, just enough for her to hear the whispers.

She thought it was a bird flying overhead at first, the soft sound of flapping wings. But the sound stretched on, and the more she listened, the more it sounded like the edges of words. It was no doubt her weary mind making nonsense out of the wind in the grass and the trees; the growing gusts made them toss and writhe like living shadows all around her, until they truly looked alive in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the black shapes but found no comfort in what she saw. The shadows moved. The wind whispered. Things crept towards her in the dark—no, she only imagined them to, just as she had imagined something following her through the woods the night or so before. She knew that for sure and certain…and yet her blood ran cold as something which looked decidedly tangible seemed to crawl closer and closer to her, and it seemed to have a pair of eyes blacker than any of the shadows around it. They were eyes. She wasn’t imagining it. Eyes like pits which stared into her frozen heart.

And then it disappeared.

Waverly stared for a long time at the place where it had vanished, too frightened to look away. It might have been anything from minutes to hours when at last she found the strength to tell herself that she had only been hallucinating in her extreme hunger. She looked up at the sky and saw the narrow clouds which raced across the stars, their edges rimmed with silver. The moon had risen enough to reach her through the trees. The beam it cast was feathery but bright as it slanted across her body, slivers of white light like broken glass.

Perhaps moonbeams truly did have some enchantment to them, because, wonder of wonders and much to her own surprise, Waverly managed to make a fire after that. Even when the moon was no longer full, its light was incredibly bright, more than enough for her to see what she was doing quite clearly; and by the time it had risen near its zenith, the flames of her campfire were quite steady. She ought to have been proud of her cheerful little blaze, but she stared up at the moon instead. Its shape was much closer now to the slightly lopsided bulge she had seen on her first night. …Almost a week beneath that strange moon, and she was still no closer to getting home.

In spite of the sheltering moonlight and the protecting fire, Waverly cried herself to sleep.